With the proliferation of information available on the Internet and the World Wide Web (the Web), many users utilize the Web for access to desired information. However, conventional approaches to seeking information on the Web are tedious and ineffective. One approach involves using a meta search engine, where a user generates search queries for the meta search engine to send to multiple predefined Internet search engines. This limits the scope of the search to the predefined Internet search engines, and is not focused on selecting specialized search engines that are likely to provide information relevant to the queries.
Another approach involves using a vertical search engine for a specialized search in a specific information domain (e.g., a vertical search engine for all health related information). A related approach involves a user selecting among a set of vertical search engines. These require the user to have knowledge of available vertical search engine capabilities, and to provide keywords that suit searching capabilities of such search engines. Other approaches determine search engine capabilities using information describing the search engines for selecting search engines. However, such approaches are limited to the type and amount of information describing search engines.
Further, many vertical search engines do not provide a programmatic search interface (e.g., search API). Instead, their interfaces are designed with HTML pages. As such, automatically filling-in fields on search engine pages using keywords is not possible without understanding precisely the semantics of the query keywords and the forms on the web pages.